Plato

Plato was born around 428 BCE in Athens — or possibly Aegina — into an aristocratic Athenian family. His given name was Aristocles; "Plato" was apparently a nickname meaning "broad" (referring to his broad shoulders, or possibly his broad forehead or his broad style of wrestling). He came of age during the Peloponnesian War, the catastrophic conflict that destroyed Athenian imperial power, and was shaped by the political turbulence that followed.

The defining event of Plato's life was the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BCE. Socrates — Plato's teacher, the central figure of his dialogues and the greatest philosophical influence on his life — was condemned to death by the Athenian democracy on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Plato was present at the trial; he was not permitted to be present at the execution (being ill, or so he says in the Phaedo). The injustice of Socrates's death permanently shaped his political philosophy: democracy, he concluded, was capable of killing the best man it had produced. His political philosophy — the philosopher-king, the ideal state — is in large measure a response to this wound.

After Socrates's death, Plato travelled extensively — to Megara, to Egypt (where he reportedly studied with Egyptian priests), to southern Italy where he encountered the Pythagorean communities, and to Syracuse in Sicily where he attempted — disastrously — to put his political philosophy into practice under the tyrant Dionysius I and his successor Dionysius II. The Sicilian adventures nearly cost him his life and were among the most important practical lessons of his career.

Around 387 BCE Plato founded the Academy in Athens — the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, which continued for over nine hundred years until it was closed by the Emperor Justinian in 529 CE. Among its students was Aristotle, who studied there for twenty years. Plato died around 348 BCE, reportedly while attending a wedding feast, at approximately eighty years old.

The Allegory of the Cave — from Book VII of the Republic — is the most famous philosophical image in Western history and one of the most powerful metaphors ever constructed. Prisoners are chained in a cave since childhood, facing a blank wall. Behind them burns a fire; between the fire and the prisoners, figures pass carrying objects, casting shadows on the wall. The prisoners, having never seen anything else, take the shadows to be reality itself.

One prisoner is freed and turned to face the fire — the light is painful and disorienting. He is dragged up out of the cave into sunlight — initially blinding, gradually revealing the true world of objects, then the sky, then the sun itself: the Form of the Good, the source of all truth and being. This is the philosopher's ascent through education and dialectic.

Then comes the twist that distinguishes Plato's philosopher from the mere mystic: the philosopher must return to the cave. Having seen the sun, they must descend back into the darkness to govern — to guide the prisoners, however poorly they are received (for their eyes, now accustomed to sunlight, are useless in the cave, and the prisoners will mock them). This obligation to return — to bring the light of knowledge back to the community, at personal cost — is the philosopher's political and ethical duty. It is why Socrates remained in Athens rather than fleeing before his execution.

Alfred North Whitehead's famous remark — that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato — is an exaggeration, but a revealing one. Plato established the questions that Western philosophy has been answering and arguing about ever since: What is real? What can we know? What is the good? What is justice? What is the soul? He established the method — rigorous dialectical argument — and many of the central concepts. Every subsequent philosopher in the Western tradition has had to define their position in relation to Plato.

His influence on the Western esoteric tradition is equally foundational. Neoplatonism — the philosophical school developed by Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE — took Plato's system as its foundation and developed it into the most sophisticated philosophical framework in late antiquity, one that directly shaped Christian theology, Islamic philosophy, Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) and the entire Renaissance Hermetic tradition. The Florentine Academy of Marsilio Ficino (15th century) — which translated Plato into Latin and sparked the Renaissance Hermetic revival — understood itself as restoring Platonic wisdom. Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism — all are, in different ways, Platonism transformed.

Atlantis — Plato's mythological civilisation — has generated more speculation, pseudo-archaeology and esoteric theorising than almost any other ancient text. Theosophy, the esoteric tradition and numerous alternative history movements have built elaborate structures on Plato's brief account. The honest position: Plato invented Atlantis as a philosophical myth, drawing on Egyptian records and his own imagination. Its value is as myth, not history.